As summer hits the midway point, it's time to start thinking about welcoming your faculty back to campus. Are you looking for some creative, fun, active ideas? I have a few ideas to share from our campus, Ipadpalooza in Austin and ISTE in Denver this summer.

The first is an experience that we offered on our campus last year. Using ﻿Goosechase,﻿ our faculty participated in a scavenger hunt. We are a comprehensive high school with a large zone. We chose to do a scavenger hunt for a few reasons. We wanted teachers to have an opportunity to meet teachers they didn't know. We let teams form on their own with one rule. The one rule was that there could not be more than one other person from a department on a team. Teams formed in groups of 5. We also wanted teachers to explore the geographic zone in which our students live. The scavenger hunt was also an opportunity for teachers to visit and thank the businesses that support our school throughout the year. In Goosechase, you can pre-select missions that they have designed or design your own. We had a creative member of our admin team design our tasks to make them specific to our community. Many of the missions he just tweaked from an idea that Goosechase provided in their mission bank. Each mission was worth a different amount of points. The teams set out in cars to compete for the grand prize which was a half day off during the year. Teachers are motivated when you give them "time". The feedback that we received from the scavenger hunt was wonderful. Funny stories of the time spent together in cars and getting to know each other were shared during the post hunt debrief. Throughout the scavenger hunt, teams posted pictures as they accomplished a mission. Posting to social media earned them extra points. The images that came in were great and shared the story of the day our teachers had with our community. Great PR as well. Watch a one minute video of a Goosechase scavenger hunt. *Please note that there is a fee to run a Goosechasewww.goosechase.com/solutions/k12/Scavenger Hunt as a large event or school wide. Teachers can use the tool for free with individual classes.

The next idea for team building is to design an Amazing Race for your faculty to compete in. Janelle Maurier shared her free iBook at IpadPalooza. The iBook, Professional Learning AppMazing Prescription, is available to download for free in the iTunes store. I can't create a link to it but if you go to the itunes store and search you will find it. It's an electronic interactive book with great ideas to create your own race organized using the tool Thinglink.

At ISTE, Josh Gauthier shared additional information about creating an Amazing Race. His presentation can be found under ISTE in Denver 2016 "Amazing Race Instructions". Theme music from the Amazing Race can be played in the background when you introduce the challenge. The feedback from educators that had participated in this in the sessions I attended was positive. These two resources should get you going in the right direction to create your own Amazing Race!

The next idea is Breakout EDU. The Breakout EDU bus was onsite at #ISTE2016 and Breakout EDU CEO Adam Bellow's along with Steve Dembo from Discovery Ed ran a great session on PD. The Breakout EDU approach creates a gaming challenge for teams to work in. ​

Over 200 Breakout EDU games have already been written. Some of the games are more polished than others. Any of the games can be adapted to your own needs as well. Breakout EDU games are all Open Source. You’ll need to register with Breakout EDU and then access the games and their details behind a password protected site.

The last idea that I have to share is a team challenge that you can create on you own. Design challenge activities for teams to complete and award badges along the way. The challenge could include activities similar to the challenges described for the Scavenger Hunt or Amazing Race. List each challenge on a shared Google Doc in view only mode. As team's completed a task they could submit their evidence through a linked Google Form. Once a form has been submitted for a task a designated group reviewing submissions could issue badges to the groups. Badges can be created and awarded in Badgelist or Credly. Badges could be worth different amounts of points as well. A leader board could be updated throughout the challenge on the Google Doc. If funds prohibit using the Goosechase platform a Badge Challenge could be an alternative solution.

Each of the team activities listed above are great options to strengthen teams. They are also all learning activities that teachers can apply to any content area. After you run one of the challenges encourage teachers to imagine the ways in which students could also develop challenges for courses and flip the role of teacher and student in creating the challenge for other students to complete.